


the future in the stars

by aetherae



Category: Tales of Vesperia
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 20:25:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1085339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aetherae/pseuds/aetherae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Estelle grows up and grows wise until she finally grows into being herself. Fifty sentences using a theme set from 1character on Livejournal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the future in the stars

**Author's Note:**

> Holy shit I seriously just ran with what I had until I couldn't run anymore. UH, headcanon and guesstimates up the wazoo here as probably 65% of this focuses on Estelle's past and a good 20% on things the game doesn't even cover (because hello, you do not just get betrayed by someone close to you then MIND-CONTROLLED by the supposed head of law without some serious repercussions). With that said, uh, ENJOY?!

**01—snow.**

This isn’t the first time she’s seen snow, but this is the first time she’s been free to run around in it as much as she pleases, make snow angels and throw snowballs at the friends she couldn’t even have dreamed of in a thousand years—so she cherishes it, laughing all the while.

**02—child.**

Her childhood is a monotonous one, of bookshelves and castle walls, strict lessons and courteous greetings; the storyteller in her simply can’t find a good tale in it, and she keeps most of those memories to herself.

**03—brick.**

It’s a trick she learned out of necessity more than anything else, to always have a heavy object close by in case of intruders—a pot, a brick, a vase, it didn’t matter—and she’s astounded when Yuri is actually able to dodge that trick; most people don’t seem to expect much from a lithe, pink-haired princess.

**04—judgment.**

With teachers at her back and the council at her front, it hardly seemed as if Estelle would ever have to judge something for herself—so she didn’t.

**05—powder.**

It gets all over, mostly on her robin-blue dress and blossom-pink hair, and when she looks back into the mirror after coughing the makeup away, hardly any of it is on her face; maybe makeup just isn’t for her.

**06—grim.**

She grits her teeth, furrows her brow, and pries the claw out of her side as slowly and as best she can while her palms sweat underneath the high afternoon sun; it’s dirty work for sure, but in the end she’s always the one who heals, even if it’s healing herself—she can do it.

**07—trap.**

Never in her wildest dreams would she have guessed what lied after Raven’s innocuous appearance at Myorzo, and just before she loses consciousness, she wonders if it was always wrong to trust him.

**08—star.**

Every night she counts the stars in the sky without fail, memorizes the constellations’ names as she traces over their pattern with her finger, the closest thing she has to a playful poke or gentle nudge for her sky-bound friends; in the end though, she’s the only one talking, and she knows she doesn’t have many friends at all.

**09—possession.**

There are some gifts she is allowed to enjoy (dresses and dolls, books and maps) while there are others she is not (sweets and swords, crass jokes and words), but the one she treasures most of all is tucked safely in the drawer of her nightstand, pink and blossoming like a flower, the only thing she cares to call her own.

**10—bandage.**

She gets her first bandage at 5-years-old, having tried to climb up the castle walls only to fall down into the castle shrubs; the castle, not unlike the bandage, is wrapped around her, but even at five she can’t help but feel like it keeps her in rather than keep something out.

**11—pearl.**

The crown jewel of Zaphias, the pearl of royalty, the castle’s librarian—the nobility she finds herself surrounded by come up with one title after another, but Estelle thinks that all these titles do is weigh her down, bind her to an identity she doesn’t know if she really is.

**12—glass.**

There are times in the library where a window will break, the glass shattering too far away to make her actually worry but loud enough to make whatever knight or tutor is with her to panic; angry shouts from outside will always follow, but her guardian will rush her out before she can make them out.

**13—classified.**

At fifteen, all of Estelle’s tutors unanimously agree that she is still far too young to learn where babies come from, that the information is classified, and that the council can’t allow her to know until she’s “of age”; at fifteen, Estelle marches into the castle’s treatment wing, bats her eyes prettily, and commands under imperial power that they give her a text regarding human reproduction.

**14—buttons.**

With the amount of battles they get into, Estelle learns how to mend on the go, patching tears and replacing buttons with mismatched ones for practicality rather than style, and by the time Duke raises a floating island into the sky, she throws practicality to the wind and spends what they have on new clothes for everyone—she is _not_ patching up whatever rips and tears they’re bound to get from a dungeon in the sky.

**15—closet.**

Estelle has three wardrobes—one for warm weather, one for cool weather, and one for special occasions—and she wishes there was someone who would play hide-and-seek with her in the castle because she’s positive her wardrobes would make for good hiding spots.

**16—ash.**

Zaphias royalty does not cremate their dead, would rather bury their blood than purge them by fire, and while Estelle does not remember much about her mother, she remembers the taste of ash in her mouth when she watched them lower her casket.

**17—definition.**

Years of textbooks and dictionaries weren’t nearly enough to teach Estelle it seemed, and soon enough thing she thought to be simple concepts such as “justice” became harder and harder to define.

**18—staircase.**

It tired her out when she was younger, climbing staircase after staircase just to go from point A to point B in the castle, but now, not a single bit of the climbing, the running, the fighting and jumping and flying, can tire her enough to keep a smile from her face for her friends.

**19—nail.**

“Oh goodness, I broke a nail again,” says a noblewoman not too far away, and Estelle glances down at her own nails, chipped and stubby from biting them when a hero was that much closer to death in a novel, the villain that much more heinous than she’d originally thought; the next day, when her maid asks the usual pleasantry of if there’s anything else she’d like, she requests a pair of gloves.

**20—prey.**

It actually makes her a bit queasy at first, having to hunt for their own dinner, but she’s already willing to kill monsters in order to live—if she has to hunt animals to live too, then so be it.

**21—backwards.**

The council has it all backwards, she realizes, wanting to put her on the throne because she has power when she should have done something to earn it _through_ her own power, not some silly notion like a birthright.

**22—trouble.**

At first, they think _Flynn_ will be the problem, the barely-inducted knight, the Lower Quarter scum hiding behind the Empire’s noble blue; it turns out that the princess _with_ Flynn is the problem, and if they thought getting a handle on the potential future Empress was a handful before, they had no idea what was coming once Estelle got Flynn to help her in keeping away from all of them.

**23—little.**

The Emperor’s throne has gone unused for as long as she can remember, touched by no one save for an extremely serious servant that will dust it, and not even she nor Ioder are allowed to sit on it, but Estelle doesn’t really mind; years later the throne still looks too big, she too small, and she even has a nightmare once of it swallowing her whole.

**24—collar.**

Her first party dress is snow white accented with pastel lilacs, the collar stiff at her neck ( _too much starch_ , she thinks, having read about the process in a book) no matter how she tries to angle her head, and she can hear the other nobles lamenting the princess’ lack of manners behind her back, right until looks them straight in the eye and all their complaints turn to praise; Estelle decides later that she doesn’t like the nobles, not at all.

**25—circle.**

It all happens without her realizing honestly—one moment she sees a bird, its wing broken and lopsided against its body, the next everything is so _bright_ , a circle of light underneath her feet as the bird’s wing begins to mend, reshape into its correct form, and for the first time young Estelle thinks to herself, _I can do something good_.

**26—hands.**

The sword is clumsy and awkward in her small, childish hands, but after two weeks Sir Drake has drilled her in the basics so many times that her form is as elegant as they come.

**27—freedom.**

She’d thought she had it bad not being let out of the castle, but no, under Alexei’s system she knows that even _that_ was a blessing its own right, to have autonomy over her own body and move when she wanted to move, to not swing her blade against someone she loved even when she begged inside her mind to stop.

**28—last.**

_This won’t last, this won’t last, they’ll save me_ , she repeats like a mantra inside her head, and while she doesn’t dare think _They’ll kill me_ to herself, the thought remains in her heart like a tender wish—or a desperate plea.

**29—scab.**

It’s supposed to be like any other wound, like a cut that will scar over, tissue upon tissue sewing itself back together, it’s supposed to be fine if you leave it alone and give it enough time, but the longer she leaves it alone, the more often her nightmares occur, the more often she feels blood on her hands and the weight of her sword heavy like a guillotine, and she realizes too late that this won’t heal like a regular wound.

**30—crown.**

She’s seen the crown before, even held it in her hands once from idle curiosity, but when she sees it placed on Ioder’s head, his small, content smile nearly matching her own, she thinks happily that it never would have looked good on her to begin with.

**31—time.**

Time moves both too slowly and too quickly, between the moments of clarity she has when her mind can push past the pain, and she doesn’t know what’s worse: that barely any time had passed since seeing her friends falling across the sky, or that so much time had passed and they were still nowhere to be found.

**32—rice.**

The first time she cooks rice is a disaster, the grains being either hard like rocks or soft like porridge, and she almost throws the whole thing away out of shame, but before she can, everyone has already pulled out a bowl and filled it with her rice, silently eating with various expressions ranging from confusion to actual disgust, but eating it all the same.

**33—worn.**

“Princesses never wear the same thing twice,” they tell her, picking her closet clean of any and all dresses she’d previously worn, even the ones she begged to let her keep because she liked them.

**34—paint.**

When she’d ask for a canvas to try painting, the servants had rushed to find the best supplies, the highest quality paints made from the rarest of ingredients, hoping for a true artist in their princess; once they’d gathered everything, they gave it to a grateful, smiling little girl and watched her paint daisies.

**35—ache.**

It surprised her to realize that in all her time with Brave Vesperia, Estelle had never once missed her home in Zaphias; only after an extended diplomatic trip across the world does she feel an unfamiliar but pleasant longing to return back to Halure.

**36—cherry.**

Zaphias Castle’s kitchen staff is all too aware of Estelle’s sweet tooth, making it increasingly difficult to get something to snack on without an admonition of “But Princess, what if you gain too much weight?!”, but once they’re in season the kitchen staff has a sudden increase of cherry pies, cherry muffins, the argument being that these cherries specifically aren’t all _that_ sweet, more tart than anything really; Estelle is eternally grateful.

**37—library.**

The first chance they can go to Zaphias without worrying about anything, Estelle shows Rita the library in the castle; she’s not surprised when the mage mentions having read almost every book on blastia they have already, but she’s pleased for every book the other girl pulls off the shelf to flip through.

**38—win.**

They restrict her to practice more than actual experience for the most part, too worried about a potential injury to the princess, but on one rare occasion her instructors allow her to practice with the knights—when she actually _beats_ one of the knights, a rookie knight but a knight all the same, they restrict her sword training sessions even more, and Estelle suspects it’s more to protect the knights’ pride than her safety.

**39—loss.**

Estelle only thought to ask her mother about her father once, and she simply replied, “He was a difficult man. I was glad to be rid of him when I was,” with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes at all; it wasn’t until later that Estelle realized that whatever chance she had to know who her father was had been lost the moment he died.

**40—fold.**

For all his time spent with the Hunting Blades, Estelle finds that Karol has _not_ developed a poker face at all; in fact, she thinks he’s just as bad as she is until a fateful game of cards one night where Karol sits and sweats and swears until he yells “Okay, okay, I give!” throwing his cards down, but that’s when reveals with a surprisingly smug smile her equally terrible hand.

**41—music.**

At the age of ten Estelle realizes that it is impossible to get an honest answer from the people around her, after the council insists she sing a solo for the upcoming banquet, because despite the polite applause and practiced praise they give her, she can’t hear any distinction in tone between their kind words and their casual disdain of anyone that isn’t nobility.

**42—bell.**

The wedding bells ring loud and clear, Ioder smiling serenely with his new wife and Empress, and while Yuri _tries_ join the congratulatory applause, he’s too preoccupied with his clothes, shifting and fidgeting against the unfamiliar rigid lines of his suit; Estelle has to hide her laugh behind her hand, telling him, “Yuri, I don’t think formal wear suits you all that much.”

**43—sleep.**

She still has nightmares sometimes, not enough to become a regular problem but enough that it always takes her by surprise, and she always has to spend the next several minutes convincing herself that yes, everyone is fine, and no, the blood she thought she could feel on her hands was simply her own panicked sweat.

**44—contact.**

It’s a little more difficult to keep in touch with everyone when they’re all spread so far apart, but it’s not as difficult as Estelle thought it would have been—Judith, for one, is far too fond of dropping in unexpectedly with Ba’ul, scaring half of Halure to death as Estelle tries to keep from giggling too hard.

**45—electricity.**

The lightning surges forward, sparks and crackles of light in the air even after it hits the ground, and Estelle is no fighter, not in the way that Yuri or Judith are, but she thinks she can feel _something_ from the charge of electricity lingering in the air, pushing her to swing her blade that much faster, that much stronger.

**46—milk.**

Her wedding gown is a soft, milk-white gown, adorned with jewels and crystals harvested across the world; it is also a waste, as it is a wedding gown meant for an Empress, not a princess, and Estelle thinks, perhaps with even something of a small smile, that they have only themselves to blame for jumping the gun and spending money on something they can’t refund.

**47—wild.**

She never knows what to expect from Repede—one moment an uninterested turn of his head and the next and irritated growl—in that she never knows just how negatively he’s thinking of her that day; it’s when he actually gives her his paw one day, face a passive blank instead of surefire displeased that she remembers another meaning of the word “wild”—deviating from the expected course.

**48—expectation.**

She’s lived so long under “your role is” and “I expect you to” or “as princess you must” that she doesn’t even know what to think when she understands that the only person she really has to answer to is herself.

**49—mechanism.**

While Estelle is well-read, she’d never understood the finer mechanics of the Hermes blastia until recently; touching her hand to a broken, useless one, she finds it ironic that the one thing she shares in common with it is how easily they can hurt the world. 

**50—finale.**

“The end,” she reads, shutting the book with a small thump, as the children gathered around her start shouting for her to start again, to read the grand tales of Brave Vesperia once more.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I do not know how Ioder snuck his way so much into this thing, but I guess that's what happens when you focus on the past of one of two potential throne inheritors.
> 
> 2\. No seriously how did the game not give like at least a skit where Estelle thought back to FUCKING MIND CONTROL in some shape or form did you hear how she screamed in Alexei's system that is some PTSD-inducing shit right there.
> 
> 3\. For a main character you'd think they would've given her more actual backstory than being a princess and having a mom, but that's Tales for you. (Or maybe not really when Team Symphonia doesn't give each and every one of its characters a horrible, sad backstory something has to be up.)
> 
> 4\. Does something not make sense in this?? Very likely seeing as how I wrote this on a sprint from 2AM-5AM, but it is what it is and as of 5:53 AM, I'm satisfied with it.


End file.
